Curation was a hot keyword in 2011, and it’s going strong into 2012. Scott Jangro, creator of Shareist, held a session at Affiliate Summit West on Digital Curation, which answered some of my questions about what curation is, and why I (as an affiliate) should care.

Digital Curation with Scott Jangro

The beginning of Scott’s presentation reaffirmed that affiliates should build sites with their future audience in mind. He then went on to discuss the (brief) history of curation, from a museum curator to Curation Nation to Scobleizer’s The Seven Needs of Real-Time Curators to today’s digital curation tools.

Adler started his session with a definition of link building that was different than what is normally thought of in the SEO community. SEOers look for links that are keyword rich, and ideally do-follow. Robert, however, will take just about any link.

He then went on to show how a site can move around the SERPs until it settles into its new position, and discussed what metrics may influence ranking.

The different shades of SEOers were defined (white, gray, black) followed by examples of the different types of links you could get back to your site.

This wasn’t your typical link building session, which may have turned off a few attendees (including the one who blamed Robert spamming his forum and wasting 20 minutes out of his day, every day). However, as an affiliate, it’s important to understand the many different types of link builders out there, what tactics they use, and how to compete against them.

While the target audience was listed as affiliates / publishers, I personally think merchants who attended got more out of the content, as affiliates can pre-sell then direct the user where to buy, but it’s the merchant who can really increase revenue via cross-sells, upsells and a simple checkout process.

Here are my notes from the session, slightly cleaned up and important parts highlighted